UN Secretary-General António Guterres will step down at the end of his second term. While the UN’s tradition of geographic rotation dictates that a leader from Latin America or the Caribbean should take the UN’s helm, US President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have signalled that they consider none of the candidates the region has fielded to be acceptable. Too many secretaries-general have acted as the world’s top diplomat, jetting around the world to virtue-signal about one cause or another while ignoring the management of the organisation they were selected to lead. The impasse has opened the door for other candidates, including Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s handpicked candidate, Feridun Sinirlioğlu.
Founded in 1949, UNRWA was meant to be temporary. In 1951, its own leaders recommended that it disband, but Arab states preserved it as a diplomatic and political lever to utilise in their own dispute against Israel.
The UN was founded on the ashes of a League of Nations that had failed to prevent World War II. Idealism about international law reigned supreme, and the end of colonial empires and emergence of new countries imbued the body with new importance.
Reality soon interceded, as the Cold War erupted and national cynicism and narrow agendas sought to hijack the new institution. This was the case with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). Founded in 1949, UNRWA was meant to be temporary. In 1951, its own leaders recommended that it disband, but Arab states preserved it as a diplomatic and political lever to utilise in their own dispute against Israel.
It was possible for them to do this because UNRWA uses a different definition of refugees from the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which the UN founded two years later, in 1951. To UNRWA, a Palestinian refugee was defined as one of the “persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict.” It limited the test case to two years because many Palestinian Arabs only arrived in the region in that period from Syria, Egypt, and elsewhere. The problem was the second part of UNRWA’s definition. “The descendants of Palestine refugee males, including adopted children, are also eligible for registration,” the organisation’s bylaws stated. Essentially, being a refugee became a permanent, genetic condition.
UNHCR’s definition — applicable everywhere else in the world — is based on individual circumstances. It defines a refugee as anyone who “owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country...” Receiving refugee status through family relations is rare, and permanent refugee status rarer still. Indeed, Barham Salih, the current UN High Commissioner for Refugees, has committed to halving refugee rolls by 2035.
Definitions matter. UNRWA records 60 lakh refugees. Twenty-four lakh hold full Jordanian citizenship but still count as refugees. Applying the UNHCR definition to Palestinians would yield a number closer to 20,000 people, with the number of living Palestinians displaced by the 1948 war and living outside the borders of historic Palestine declining each year.
Turkey and Pakistan both object to the idea that non-Muslims should rule over Muslims, even in a democratic society. They see Hindutva as illegitimate.
Many Indians, especially those from left-of-centre parties, both sympathise with the Palestinians over Israel and give deference to the United Nations to constrain great powers that often act arrogantly without regard to international law. The problem with such deference is that the United Nations remains hostage to its members, few of whom uphold its founding ideals above their own self-interest.
Turkey and Pakistan both object to the idea that non-Muslims should rule over Muslims, even in a democratic society. They see Hindutva as illegitimate. At issue is not only Kashmir but all of India. At a hate-speech forum Turkey co-hosted with Pakistan on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, for example, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan asked, “In India, how will we defend Muslim youth who are being whipped, beaten by machetes and even sentenced to death just for eating beef?” With Turkey pushing Sinirlioğlu, the UN may soon face another round of national agendas trumping ideals.
Sinirlioğlu cultivates an image of dryness. He was essentially the Konstantin Chernenko of the Turkish Foreign Ministry. But like Chernenko, he is a loyal apparatchik to the ideology he serves. Chernenko, as Soviet premier, did not deviate from the communism that had enabled his rise through the bureaucracy. At every inflection point, Sinirlioğlu has defaulted to Erdoğan. If India does not object to Sinirlioğlu vociferously, it risks having the next UN secretary-general make the Kashmir issue his priority, and not in a way that abides by international law favouring India.
The situation could be much more dangerous for India, though, if the new secretary-general and the Islamist bloc conspire to change the definition of refugee in South Asia from the traditional UNHCR definition, under which most refugees have long since resettled during the exchange of populations, and instead promote a UNRWA-like definition of perpetual refugee status.
One crore forty-five lakh people migrated during Partition from India into West and East Pakistan, or from Pakistan into India. If the UN chose to recalculate Indian subcontinent refugees, it would suddenly add more than 140 million refugees to its rolls.
India is the world’s largest democracy and will soon be the world’s third-largest economy. If there were justice at the United Nations, India would replace the United Kingdom on the Security Council.
UNRWA was never about justice. It counted recent migrants to Palestine as refugees, but it ignored the equal number of Jews expelled from Arab countries and Iran, all of whom had called those Muslim-majority countries home for centuries. A cynical, pro-Turkish secretary-general could equally massage definitions to ensure only Muslims received refugee status, but not the Hindus forced out by Islamist pogroms.
India is the world’s largest democracy and will soon be the world’s third-largest economy. If there were justice at the United Nations, India would replace the United Kingdom on the Security Council. Too often, however, India refuses to flex its muscles and demand its diplomatic due. This can be bad at the best of times, but when its enemies gather, it can be a fatal mistake. New Delhi needs to speak up now and demand that the next UN secretary-general not be anti-India or pursue agendas inimical to peace in South Asia.
